The Girl from Felony Bay (23 page)

“What's that sound?” Bee asked.

“There's a section of metal grating on the bridge,” I told her.

“Timmy doesn't like it.”

The pony was sidestepping and tossing his head. “He'll be okay,” I said. “Just follow behind me.”

Clem's years of being a carriage horse should make him okay with the metal grate, I told myself. I just hoped I was right.

“What if I get bucked off?” Bee asked.

“You won't,” I said, crossing my fingers and making a wish that she really wouldn't.

Both Clem and Timmy were jumpy as we started onto the bridge, and several drivers had to hit their brakes and swerve around us. I whacked Clem's butt to urge him into a trot. We were almost home free. Two hundred yards ahead loomed the tall buildings of the Medical University Hospital, and just beyond were the old neighborhoods where we should be able to lose ourselves in the tangle of narrow streets.

We were nearing the end of the bridge when it happened. A black pickup truck going in the opposite direction slammed on its brakes. The driver's head was turned toward us, and I caught a quick glimpse of Uncle Charlie's scowl of surprise and rage.

My own eyes went wide with shock, and my heart seized in my chest. Uncle Charlie was holding up traffic. There was angry honking behind him, but he didn't seem to care. He gave me a look that made my blood turn to ice; then he floored his accelerator and shot forward, speeding toward the opposite end of the bridge, where I knew he would find a place to turn and come roaring back in our direction.

“Come on, Bee,” I said, smacking Clem's flanks with my switch. It seemed to take forever, but finally he started to canter, and I held on to my slapdash rope harness for dear life.

“Where are we going?” Bee asked as we reached the end of the bridge.

“Here,” I said, slowing Clem to a trot and turning into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Around the back there was an exit onto a smaller road.

Uncle Charlie was close behind us—I could feel it. I kept looking over my shoulder for the black pickup, but thankfully I didn't see it. We turned right at our first intersection, then immediately left, zigzagging and winding through the twisting inner roads around the hospital.

There were a lot more cars on the road now. A number of drivers stared at us wide-eyed. There was a big risk that one of them might use their cell phone to report us to the police. We couldn't afford to let that happen, because the police would just turn us over to Uncle Charlie. We crossed another road and went into the parking lot of a small corner building. The lot went around the back and gave us a momentary place to hide while I tried to come up with an idea.

Even if we were out of sight, Uncle Charlie was still searching. He would never quit. He would drive up and down all the roads around the Medical University and poke into all the open parking lots. No place around there was safe.

It was almost full daylight, and the streetlights that had started lining the streets when we crossed off James Island were winking out. We had to get Clem and Timmy out of sight fast, but where were we ever going to hide a couple horses in downtown Charleston? Also, we needed to get ourselves to some place where there would be lots of people around, so even if Uncle Charlie found us, he wouldn't be able to do anything bad.

The problem was that it wasn't even six o'clock. There were a few people on the street now, but hardly any places were open. I thought about Custis, but I didn't know where he lived. I knew he wouldn't be at work until probably eight thirty at the earliest, which meant we had a serious amount of time to kill. My brain was a muddle of panicked thoughts, but I tried to calm myself enough to think.

“I've got an idea,” I told Bee, after I'd thought it through as well as I could. There was at least one place that was open, where we would be safe until it was time to go down to Custis's office. Also there was something I needed to do there, and I had to do it before we went any farther.

We headed out from behind the building, trusting our luck to hold just a little longer. There were only three blocks to go, and I knew a way to stay off the street for at least one of them.

We made it to the end of the first block, then turned into one of the Medical University parking lots. Lucky for us, the booths where the money collectors sat were dark because it was still too early for anyone to be on duty. Just as I hoped, Clem was heavy enough to make a ticket pop out of the machine when I walked him forward. I told Bee to get Timmy beside me; then I took the ticket and we rode through when the gate went up.

At the far end of the lot a sidewalk led to the center of the Medical University campus. We followed it and rode across the big, deserted Medical University green and out to the road on the other side.

Now there was only one short block to go. As we trotted down the deserted street, the clopping of the horses' hooves seemed terribly loud. Every second, I expected to hear the screech of tires or see Uncle Charlie's black pickup come sliding around the corner after us, but we made it to the high wrought-iron fence that surrounded Miss Walker's School for Girls without getting caught.

“Are we going in there?” Bee asked, when I slid off Clem's back and walked up to the gate.

As I looked through the fence at my old school with its old buildings, broad green lawns, and large fishpond with water lilies and fountain, I nodded. “If they haven't changed the combination on the electric lock.”

They hadn't changed the combination even once in the seven years I had gone there, so I figured there was a pretty good chance that they still hadn't. I held my breath and punched in the old code. As soon as I did, I heard the magnetic lock snap, and I shoved the gate open.

We led the horses inside, took off Timmy's saddle and blanket and both bridles, and stuffed them in a sheltered spot. The horses took long drinks from the fishpond, then started grazing, seeming quite comfortable in their new surroundings.

Since school was out for the summer, I didn't think anybody would be coming onto campus for a while, and I hoped that when they did, they wouldn't be too angry to discover the horses. I would try to explain things later.

Bee and I went back out the gate, looked down the block to make sure no black pickups were coming, then trotted across the street and retraced our steps to the Medical University Hospital. Inside the hospital lobby, we headed straight for the elevators, but the guard at the information desk called out to us.

“Young ladies, it's six o'clock in the morning. You're about three hours early for visiting patients.”

“We're going to see our father,” I told him.

The guard eyed us as if he didn't believe me. “What room is your father in?”

“Six thirty-two,” I said. “Rutledge Covington Force.”

The guard punched in my father's name on his keyboard and checked the name and room number. “Okaaay,” he said, drawing the word out long. “Still pretty early if you ask me. There some reason you can't wait for normal visiting hours?”

“We have to go out of town. Our flight leaves in a couple hours, and we won't be back for a week. We promised we'd visit before we left.”

He looked back and forth between us as he thought it over. Finally he waved his hand and told us to go on. As we walked toward the elevator, I heard him mutter to himself about how some people today just let their kids run around like wild animals.

If he only knew the truth, I thought.

A
bout two minutes later,
we walked off the elevator onto the sixth floor and went to the locked door, where I rang the buzzer. After several seconds a startled-looking nurse came down the corridor and squinted through the glass at us a moment before opening the door.

“What are you girls doing here?” she asked, glancing down at her wristwatch. “Do you know what time it is?”

I'd never seen this nurse on the day shift, so I didn't recognize her, and she certainly didn't recognize me. “We're Rutledge Covington Force's daughters,” I said.

“Both of you?”

Bee gave her a very pretty smile. “Yes, ma'am. I'm adopted.”

“Oh,” the nurse said. “Of course. You're here to see your father?”

“We have to fly out of town in just a short time,” Bee said, smoothly picking up the lie. “We promised ourselves that we would come in to visit him before we left.”

“Okay,” the nurse said. She still seemed confused, but she wasn't fighting us. “Go on in.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Bee said, smiling and using her best Southern manners.

The nurse got that brain-dead smile adults so often do when kids throw in lots of syrupy sirs and ma'ams.

Having no time to waste on greetings, I went straight to Daddy's bed, sat down on the side, and took his hand the way I always did. Then I sucked down a deep breath.

“Daddy,” I said in a soft voice, “I have to tell you some important things. I've been telling you lies for a long time now. You've been asleep ever since last August, when you fell down in your library and cracked your head. I've been afraid if I told you the truth about what's happened since then, you wouldn't ever want to wake up. But now things are pretty bad, and I think it's time to tell you.

“When I found you and called the ambulance, the police came to the house. There was a bunch of jewelry and stuff that had spilled out of a hiding place in the ceiling, and so when the ambulance people took you to the hospital, the police collected the jewelry and looked all around the house.

“Later on they said you'd taken all the gold and jewelry that Miss Jenkins used to keep in her safe, and . . .” I stopped. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I swear I felt that Daddy wasn't in that same deep sleep he'd been in for the past nine months. For some reason I was convinced he was really trying to listen to me.

“So anyway, Miss Jenkins had to be paid back, and Mr. Barrett said the only way to do it was to sell Reward. So that's what happened. It got sold last February. The good news is that the new owners' name is also Force. Their ancestors used to be slaves on the plantation. I know if you can hear me you're sad that Reward was sold, but you're glad about who's living there now.

“My new best friend is Bee Force. She's the daughter of the owner. She's twelve, and she's right here in the room with me. And the reason we're here is that we had to run away from Reward tonight because we discovered something really bad.”

Over the next couple of minutes, everything I'd been holding back, all the rest of the story, came pouring out. I told Daddy how the Felony Bay property had been sold separately from the rest of the plantation and how Uncle Charlie, Ruth, and Bubba Simmons had buried their old chest after midnight and then chased us and kept us from getting back to the big house to tell Bee's grandmother what we had seen. I told how we had ridden horses from Reward into Charleston and how we were hiding out until we could get ahold of Custis and tell him everything that had happened.

I finally stopped talking. Daddy had gone so still that it frightened me. I couldn't tell whether I'd done a good thing or a terrible thing by confessing.

“I'm sorry if I told you too much,” I said, fighting back the tears that were trying to burn their way out of my eyes. Right then, I was afraid I had just made everything worse, maybe much worse. Only I didn't think I'd had any choice.

“I really, really need you to wake up,” I told Daddy. “I really need you to help me figure out what we should do.”

We stayed in Daddy's room until eight thirty. Neither of us had eaten since dinner the night before, and we had no money to go to the cafeteria. We sat there with our stomachs growling like angry dogs, taking drinks of water from the tap in the bathroom. We both jumped every time the door opened and one of the nurses came in to check on Daddy, because each time we expected it to be Uncle Charlie.

Bee kept looking at her watch. “Don't you think I should call Grandma Em?” she asked. “She's going to be worried sick when she realizes I'm gone.”

“Okay, but you can't tell her where we are. She's going to want to come get us, but first we need to talk to Mr. Barrett or Custis.”

She promised and went into the hall to borrow a cell phone from one of the nurses. She came back a minute later with a worried look.

“That's weird,” she said. “There's a recording when I call the house that says the phone is out of order.”

“Did you call her cell?”

“It doesn't work at the house.”

“Maybe she's sleeping late,” I offered, hoping it was true.

Bee shook her head. “What if she heard something last night and realized that I'd snuck out? What if she went out to find me, and Uncle Charlie did something to her?”

I shook my head, but it was mostly instinct. I didn't want to admit that Uncle Charlie would do something really terrible like kidnapping an innocent old lady. But then I thought about what he had tried to do to us in the past few hours . . . and also how Deputy Simmons had wanted to use his gun to try to shoot us when he couldn't find us. Uncle Charlie only stopped him because he'd been afraid the sound would carry.